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The Ongoing Debate Over Cloud Management Tools

In an article published earlier this week on Network World, Senior Writer Brandon Butler tackled the debate over cloud management tools. His bottom line? Cloud management tools are 100 percent necessary, but are lacking in maturity at this point in time.

Gartner agrees. According to Mindy Cancila, research director at Gartner, the tools available for businesses to manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions are not as mature as the public cloud services themselves. Leading providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure offer tools that are adept at managing their own platforms – but what about businesses that leverage services from multiple cloud providers or have implemented a combination of both private and public cloud resources? In a hyper-competitive market, cloud vendors have no incentive to allow customers to manage competitors’ clouds.

At Carpathia, we take quite a different stance. We know that implementing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy is not only becoming increasingly more common, but also necessary.
The ability to move workloads between third party clouds, private clouds and hosted infrastructure gives businesses greater flexibility, agility and the power to choose the most suitable environment for their applications and workloads at any given point in time. However, it also makes monitoring and managing those environments significantly more complex.

To deliver the best support for your business, a cloud management tool should have five key components:

Interoperability
You may be thinking “no surprise here!” but interoperability is arguably the most critical element of a cloud management tool, and not offered by many. A cloud management tool should enable application and workload interoperability across multiple cloud providers, achieved through an understanding of APIs, configurations, authentication processes and more.

Consolidated Portal View
Having a consolidated portal view is paramount so that IT staff can access, monitor and support workloads all in one place without having to toggle back and forth between different windows or portals.

Automated Discovery
When your cloud management tool can automatically discover and tag new or updated resources and pull them into your business’ multi-cloud environment, think about how much less complex your IT team’s workload can become.

Ease of Use
Your cloud architecture may be complex, but the tool you use to manage it shouldn’t be. Successful cloud management tools should have universal logins, intuitive navigation, real-time analytics and more.

24x7x365 Support
Last, but certainly not least, is 24x7x36 support. Using a cloud management tool that is backed by a round-the-clock, high-touch support team is essential to make sure your environments are always operating at peak performance.

As more and more businesses adopt a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, the need for management tools that ensure these complex cloud environments are managed as effectively as possible will only continue to grow.

If you’re interested in learning more about management tools, we encourage you to download our full multi-cloud management checklist.

What key components would you say are most important to your business?